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OneNote 2010 Preview

Microsoft's OneNote 2010 is one of the more highly anticipated releases of the new product cycle. In this article we're going to take a quick look at what's new that you can use in your practice.

If you're already using Office 2007 and only want to upgrade to OneNote 2010...well, I think you're missing out, but...OneNote 2010 should work just fine with Office 2007.

Docked Notes

One thing folks say about OneNote is that it's great but they often forget they have it or that they wish they could more easily have it right there on screen while they're working. With OneNote 2010 there is a new view called "Docked View". Click the docking icon on the tool bar (see it selected in the image at right?) and OneNote 2010 will dock nicely to the right side of your screen. (see picture at right)

From here it's easier to keep your notes, to-do items, important information or numbers right there at hand for reference. Plus, any time you need to take some notes on what you're doing the notes page is right there at hand.

The other advantage to Docked View is that it works nicely with the new Linked Note Taking feature of OneNote 2010.

Linked Note Taking

Linked Note Taking is a nifty new feature that associates the notes you're taking with the document you're looking at. When you turn this feature on OneNote will automatically build a link from your notes to the document (Word, Excel, etc.) that you were working on at the time.

Nifty way to do document review and keep notes, eh?

One thing to note: this feature only works on notebooks that have been created with OneNote 2010 or converted to OneNote 2010 format.

Recycle Bin

If you accidentally delete a page or section you can now recover that from the OneNote recycle bin. Just right-click the notebook and go to "Notebook Recycle Bin" to find the pages/sections that you've deleted.

NOTE: This only works in OneNote 2010 format notebooks (keep reading)

Who Wrote That?

If you're sharing a notebook with colleagues you may have discovered that it's not always obvious who wrote what note in the notebook. You can right-click the Note Handle on the left side of the note and find the info there, but that's not always inuitive and it's a pain if you have to do that a lot. OneNote 2010 solves that problem by placing the initials of a note's author to the right side of the note. Now you can quickly, at a glance, tell which of your team inserted or edited a particular note, picture or other item in OneNote.

New Notebook Format

As so often happens with new versions, there is a new notebook format. OneNote 2010 can read and write OneNote 2007 files just fine, but to enable some of the more advanced features such as versioning, equations, linked note taking, the recycle bin, the OneNote web app and more.

Any new notebooks created in OneNote 2010 will automatically be created in 2010 format, but you can convert them easily to 2007 format if you need to by right-clicking the notebook, choosing properties and then clicking the "Covert to 2007" button. When you're ready, convert it back to 2010 format the same way (except click "Convert to 2010"). You can also quickly convert existing 2007 format notebooks that way.

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